Thursday, April 27, 2017

Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day, Boxing Day – three great days of family and tradition, and three
trips to the movies. Here’s my take on what the movie Santa brought us.

Starting in the
middle, I went on Christmas Day to see Michael Mann’s Ali. Mann is one of the finest American directors. His style
alternates between slick (he created Miami
Vice) and artfully messy; he draws equally on psychological exactitude and
melodramatic grandstanding – much of the fascination of The Insider, his last film, came from the tension between Russell
Crowe in the former category and Al Pacino in the latter. His films are
glorious works of design and drama, with the music track almost perilously
foregrounded. I don’t suppose Mann smokes cigars on the set, but I always
imagine he does – he’s that kind of old-fashioned auteur general.

Ali presents him with overwhelming opportunities in these areas, and the
greatest surprise of the film is Mann’s relative restraint. Not that the film
lacks his usual panache. The opening sequence, intercutting between Ali
training for a fight against Sonny Liston, a Sam Cooke night-club performance,
and miscellaneous snippets of Ali’s history (including traveling as a boy on
the “coloreds only” section of the bus), is dazzling. The fight sequences are
staggeringly well-realized. I could go on. But the heart of the film, of
course, is the man himself. And for once, Mann seems to blink, coming close to
giving the film a soft centre.

Ali

Fortunately, he has
Will Smith in excellent, perhaps Oscar-winning form, conveying Ali’s mixture of
canniness, rough-edged charisma, and bull-headed naivete. The movie has been
widely criticized for not explaining Ali to us, but I think it shows how he
surely defied explanation even to himself. Near the end, road-training in Zaire
for the “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman, he wanders off the road,
a crowd accumulates around him, and he comes across a huge drawing of himself
on the side of a battered old wall. Mann holds the scene at great length; just
soaking in Ali’s almost overawed reaction, almost puzzlement (despair?) at the
weight of his own myth and rhetoric. The scene goes on for so long, the movie
seems about to throw in the towel. And indeed, thereafter, it functions largely
as a recreated documentary (largely reenacting the material covered in the
documentary When we were Kings).

Veteran sports
columnist Robert Lipsyte, in the New York
Times, describes as a “major lie” the context in which Ali says the line “I
ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.” The movie, says Lipsyte, presents the
line “as a measured explanation for his refusal to be drafted” whereas the
truth is that the sentence was “blurted…after a long day of being hectored.”
This must illustrate the ambiguity of the film’s portrayal, for it seemed clear
to me that the move’s Ali basically does “blurt” out the line, and then decides
to stick with it, making up his philosophy on the hoof (one of several such
instances in the film). It’s the same mixture of waywardness and populism that
has Ali calling himself “The Peoples’ Champion” while insisting in the next
breath that he’s going to be the kind of champion he wants to be.

Lipsyte also
criticizes the film for leaving out “a reckoning that might have come out of
Greek tragedy, (the fact that) Ali’s unique gifts of movement and speech
(became) seriously impaired.” The movie ends after the 1974 “Rumble” and
doesn’t address Ali’s subsequent Parkinson’s disease, not even in the ending
captions. But it’s hard to see how such a last chapter wouldn’t have fallen
into morose irony and easily reductive metaphor, falling far short of Greek
tragedy. Still, my guess going in would have been that Mann would take it on.
His refusal to do so is another example of how he keeps the gloves off. In all,
I thought Ali was terrific, one of
the year’s best. Still, a lot of that opinion may be based in an appreciation
of how it relates to Mann’s other pictures. Absent that perspective, it’s
probably too problematic a film to win general acceptance.

Gosford Park

On Boxing Day, I saw
Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. As I
pointed out recently, virtually every estimable new film nowadays is compared
to some Altman film or other. It’s a pleasure to see that the man himself can
still get it done. The new film is set in a British country house in 1932,
where a group of aristocrats gathers for the weekend. The film devotes equal
time to the servants, inhabiting a below-stairs community with its own rules.
The essence of the picture lies in its coordination and juxtaposition, and
Altman’s handling is masterly – shot after shot takes your breath away with its
deftness in moving from one character and mood to another.

The broad premise is
that the upper-class are barren and spent (a point ruthlessly executed here)
and on the verge of being, if not displaced, at least squeezed by their
underlings for supremacy (of any kind). Almost any randomly chosen five-minute
chunk of the film would demonstrate this point. The movie turns into a nominal
whodunit, with the bumping-off of one of the toffs precipitating an
investigation. Altman’s handling of this aspect is so perfunctory that it’s
clear it barely matters. Even so, although the denouement is dramatically
little more than a shrug, it supports the overall theme. I enjoyed the film
enormously, yet among Altman’s later works I think Cookie’s Fortune remains his most rich and scintillating.

The Majestic

Jim Carrey’s latest
shot at an Oscar (it’s hard not to concede to the tabloid wisdom on this point)
turned out to be his biggest box office flop, and a backward step in terms of
artistic credibility. The Majestic
has been critically derided, and Carrey may be the weakest thing in it. It’s a dawdling, feel-good piece about a 50s
Hollywood screenwriter who loses his memory and ends up in a small town where
he’s mistaken for a long-lost son who was presumed killed during WW2. Carrey
helps his presumed father renovate the local movie theater, romances the dead man’s
former girlfriend, and has no idea that the FBI is searching for him as a
suspected Communist subversive.

The latter element
is supposed to establish the film’s seriousness, but is so lamely treated that
it undermines the “Capraesque” qualities of the rest. The Majestic is almost incalculably far below the other two films
dealt with here. Even so, I find myself more positive on the film than most
critics. It seems to me almost identical in quality to director Frank Darabont’s
previous The Green Mile; since that
(Oscar-nominated) film was incredibly overrated, The Majestic comes as no surprise whatsoever. Much as with Ali, although in a very different way, a
lot depends on your expectations. But then that’s Christmas for you!

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Mulholland Drive recently became one of the few movies in the
last few years I’ve paid to see twice (the others being, if memory serves, Magnolia, Bamboozled, Crouching Tiger Hidden
Dragon, YiYi and The Wind Will Carry
Us – this must evidently be a personal recent pantheon of sorts). In all
these cases, the second visit was immensely worthwhile, maybe more with Mulholland Drive than most. Of course,
the film is famously hard to figure out, so that’s no surprise. But I think
it’s worth repeating here, for those put off by the prospect of confusion, that
it’s one of last year’s best.

Mulholland Drive
again

In a second viewing,
knowing how many of the film’s secondary elements end up as pure loose ends, I
concentrated from the outset on the character played (brilliantly) by Naomi
Watts, and saw more clearly how the film’s first half represents a fantastic,
desperate rehabilitation by that character of her grim Hollywood experience.

One of the keys to
this is the passivity of the character played by Laura Elena Harring – she has
no name, no memory, only a minimal agenda, and Watts seems at times almost to
move her around like some kind of big doll. Their love scene is pure joyful seduction.
Meanwhile, the filling of the lead role in director Justin Theroux’s film is
the subject of impenetrable conspiracy and deviousness – while it might hurt to
lose a role that way, it’s also an effective rationalization for failure.

With such a rewriting
of her sad facts, Watts reimagines defeat as victory. In the second half (what
I take to be the “real” world of the film), she’s lost control over herself,
her career and her relationship with Harring – this section is suffused with
her powerlessness and frustration. At the very end, it struck me that the weird
old couple who appear first as her benefactors and later as her tormentors are
probably her parents, or at least a representation of whatever developmental
trauma brought her to this point: her dream necessarily begins with safely
repackaging them into benign idiots. In total, this is a much sadder impression
than I came away with first time round.

I’ve always been
unsure about Lynch’s work, although I loved The
Straight Story (but then, of course, that’s his most atypical film). Mulholland Drive is one of the rare
movies that makes me want to go back and revisit all its maker’s previous work.
But I suspect I’ll still find Lost
Highway and Wild at Heart and the
others a little lacking, because I think they miss the profound human tragedy
that gives Mulholland Drive its
shape. Narratively, the film is as confusing as anything you’ll see at the
multiplex, but in so many other ways, it’s more deeply coherent than almost
anything else out there.

More awards

No, you’re not
imagining it – every year, they have more awards shows than the year before.
This year the American Film Institute (“Advancing and preserving the art of the
moving image”) established its own gig. Unlike the usual five nominees, the AFI
had ten – a surprisingly well-rounded list including Mulholland Drive, Memento and The
Man who Wasn’t There. Unfortunately, the televised award show was
undermined by most of the winners choosing to stay away. And then, at the end,
they gave the prize to Lord of the Rings.

The citation on the
AFI’s website is as follows: “Lord of the
Rings taps the mythical forces of American film to bring life to J R R
Tolkien’s rich literary legacy. Never losing sight of the “human” elements of
this first book in his trilogy, the scope of the film sets the standard by
which future motion picture epics should be judged.”

So there you go – presumably
that’s the measure of what most advanced and preserved the art of the moving
image in 2001. Even by the AFI’s own account, it sounds as much about commerce
as art. Anyway, I think this kind of recognition stamps Lord of the Rings as the most overrated movie of last year. I
concede that I like it less than anyone else I know, and I’m sure it’s a treat
for fans of the book (I haven’t read it – it’s always seemed to me the
archetypal activity for which life is too short). But on its own merits, the
film is a stuffy, plodding, monotonous bore.

Lord of the Rings

For sure, the film’s
“scope” is real, with some magnificent landscapes and individual sequences. At
times, it does indeed evoke slightly greater psychological complexity than the
average action epic. But it doesn’t have much panache, and it’s hampered by
deadly seriousness. The Harry Potter
film has been criticized for being overly faithful to the book and creating
little artistic personality of its own. But even if that’s true, the film nails
the giddy thrill of a world just below the surface of our own, so close you
could scratch it, yet bursting with marvels. Lord of the Rings starts off with a voice-over cumbersomely
defining the rules of its universe, sticks with those rules throughout, and
never winks at the audience. If you can surrender your mind to all that stuff
about magical rings and kingdoms of elves, then you’re fine. But it’s
relentlessly self-contained – you wait in vain for any thematic or metaphorical
payoff that might be any good to you once you step back into the real world.

And however
well-executed the physical elements may be, it still comes down to the same
cliffhanger escapes, battles in which each hero slays about twenty of the other
side, the same visual and aural fireworks. The current movie is just the first
part of a trilogy, but at the end of it I felt as if I’d watched three films
already. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be back for the other two.

As for the American
Film Institute, since 1973 it’s given out a life achievement award. The first
recipient was John Ford, and in the early days the award recognized as many
great directors (Hitchcock, Capra, Welles) as actors (Bette Davis, Henry Fonda,
James Cagney). But it’s four years now since any director won, and this year’s
recipient is Tom Hanks. He’s 45 years old! What about David Lynch, Robert
Altman, Francis Coppola, Arthur Penn? Well, given that the last two winners
were Harrison Ford and Barbra Streisand, it’s clear that the assessment of “life
achievement” is a hell of a lot more popcorn-driven than it used to be. If you
ask me, they’ve sold out to the cult of celebrity – and to their desire to get a
big audience for the televised banquet. Is the art of the moving image really
at a point where it owes more to Tom Hanks than anyone else, and where Lord of the Rings is its finest
embodiment? Don’t believe it for a second.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

The other day I was
watching Howard Hawks’ 1948 Red River
– one of my favourite director’s best films. In the first half of the film, I
always get lost in its feeling of authenticity – the stampede and the river
crossing and all those epic views of the cattle traversing the desert. But of
course, Red River isn’t “realistic”
in the sense of aspiring to the pace and cadences of normal exchange. Hawks’
style was naturalistic in some ways, but he kept things within certain
parameters of behaviour, generating a wholly distinct, recognizable
stylization.

In Red River, it kicks in particularly in
the last third, when a woman gets involved. She meets Montgomery Clift in the
middle of an Indian attack, falls for him even though he’s brusque toward her,
and by the end of the evening she’s in his arms. Then she sets the basis for a
reconciliation between him and John Wayne. It’s scintillating as a study in
character, but it’s clearly idealized, and in some ways it rubs oddly against
the film’s more verisimilitudinous aspects. Rio
Bravo, my favourite Hawks film, seems more unified – notionally a Western,
but actually an almost abstract world where Hawks indulges his notions of
character to the hilt.

Meaning of Right

A few days
afterwards, I watched Ridley Scott’s Black
Hawk Down, and Red River came to
mind in two ways. First, my wife had half-watched Red River, and when the Indians are circling the wagon train she
remarked it looked like an old-fashioned view of natives – one that probably
wouldn’t get put on screen today. Which may be true for the Indians, but Black Hawk Down’s portrayal of the
Somalians as a similarly anonymous, gun-toting mob seemed awfully close to the
same thing. And then, before going into battle, Josh Hartnett says how he “just
wanna do it right today,” and I thought how much Red River cites the notion of being “good.” If you watch enough
Hawks films, you figure out his meaning of “good.” The ambiguity of Black Hawk Down is whether you think it
know the meaning of “right.”

Scott used to be
regarded as a brilliant eye, whose visual mastery might compensate for lesser
acuity in matters of character and storytelling. But the failure of 1492 and White Squall seemed to put paid to that phase, and he’s now reinvented himself as the ultimate Hollywood general – knocking out Gladiator, Hannibal and Black Hawk Down in less than two years.
All three can probably be seen as pure hackwork. But if Black Hawk Down is hackwork, it’s such an accomplished example as
to make the term meaningless.

The film, set in
Somalia in 1993, is about a failed military mission – a group of mostly young
Americans in Humvees and helicopters fly into the centre of Mogadishu, to
capture a bunch of warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid’s lieutenants. The mission
goes astray almost immediately, leaving many of the Americans holed up, trying
to hold back bloodthirsty waves of Aidid’s supporters – it’s a land where bread
is scarce but guns apparently plentiful.

State of Hostility

It’s a superb
recreation, exhibiting only minimal contrivance; it evokes the sad desolation
of Mogadishu and the pounding chaos of battle with equal skill. But there may
never have been a war film so unconcerned with the broader context, with the
political and strategic rights and wrongs. The film has an unusually long
series of captions at the start, fixing the time and place and the approximate
state of hostility, and again at the end. But in between, we just get the event
itself. To the film’s detractors, this is a key point of moral as well as
artistic weakness. This is Rick Groen in The
Globe and Mail:

“Without any
surrounding context – without a deeper characterization of the men or a proper
account of the politics that brought them there – we’re left to respond to the
blood and guts viscerally but not emotionally. The edge of our seat gets a
strenuous workout, yet our heart and mind go pretty much untouched…if this is
artistry, it comes perilously close to the spirit and intent of propaganda – a
paean to the triumph of soldierly will.”

Maybe…and yet, if
the blood and guts attains such realism, what artistic prodding should we need
in order to respond emotionally? Isn’t our reason for grieving inherent in
what’s being shown? Maybe that sounds like moralizing on my part, but I think
it’s conceivably an artistic strategy by Scott.

Triumph of will

I started wishing he
had gone even further with this – that the film was an even more aggressively
self-contained, claustrophobic experience. It still has many of the trappings
of the conventional war movie, albeit downplayed. There’s the motley bunch of
recruits (although the film is mostly reticent about their backgrounds), the
theme of naivete and bluster receiving a harsh wake-up call (at the start, the
men are so nonchalant about the mission that they leave behind standard pieces
of equipment), the contrast between the turmoil on the frontline and the
general in his high-tech bunker, the pep talks and one-liners (“It’s what you
do right now that makes a difference”). Saving
Private Ryan contained two or three magnificent sequences, and a lot of
mundane padding. Black Hawk Down
sharply reduces the mundanity ratio, but it doesn’t find a new vocabulary of
war – it doesn’t have the grand vision and shocking introspection of Apocalypse Now (but then, I query how
“realistic” that film really is) or the troubled poetry of The Thin Red Line (ditto). I think it might have got there, had it
taken its approach even further – to the point where character and personality
might virtually disappear completely.

As it is, as I
mentioned, character and personality disappear only among the Somalis. This too
might have been a persuasive artistic strategy, if Scott didn’t sometimes seem to be personalizing them
– through shots of children carrying guns, or in which a face is picked out of
the crowd (usually just before being blown away). And a scene in which a
captured soldier is interrogated, providing his captor the most dialogue of any
Somali in the movie, may be the most clichéd in the picture. This aspect of the
film ends up seeming confused and a little opportunistic.

The brutal reality
leaves many of the Americans dead and serves as a rite of passage for the
others. I suppose that amounts to the “triumph of soldierly will” in Groen’s
phrase, but what is that really saying? Ultimately, Black Hawk Down illustrates the limits of setting so much store by authenticity. I expect the film can be read to support whatever preconception
the viewer brings to it. Maybe that’s an artistic evasion by Scott, but it’s
sadly not untrue to its subject.

This is the eighth
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

Les Amants reguliers (Philippe Garrel)

In my preview
article I noted I'd never seen any of Garrel’s films, and was looking
forward to remedying that here; the anticipation only grew after he won the
Best Director award for this film at the Venice film festival (which ends
during the first weekend of the Toronto fest). Regular Lovers is a long film (just under three hours) and I won’t
claim that you don’t feel that length, but it’s a rewarding experience. The
protagonist is a young poet (played by Garrel’s own son Louis), initially at
the centre of the 1968 agitation – we see him burning cars, resisting the
police, and ultimately evading capture after a long, skin-of-his-teeth chase.
At this point he has every potential for cultural and political distinction,
but this slowly dissipates; he lives with several like-minded friends in a
large house owned by a rich friend, smoking drugs and languishing, and then he
meets a woman with whom he falls in love, but whose presence only seems to
increase his stasis (someone says that they are “losing the revolution
indoors”). Despite the reciprocity of her love for him, her trajectory is much
more familiar and coherent, leading to an inevitable outcome. The film is shot
in luminous black and white, and it generally maintains a narrow tonal
register; although the plot includes free love, the presentation is extremely
chaste by contemporary standards (the only sex we ever see is on a package of
dirty playing cards). This gives it a melancholy, repressed quality that’s
effective in evoking the unfulfilled underpinnings of what might otherwise seem
(as it did, for example, in Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers, which also starred Louis Garrel) as a lush wet dream of a
lifestyle); the girl says at one point, a propos of nothing in particular,
“It’s unbelievable, the solitude in every man’s heart,” and it’s this solitude,
immune to all genres of revolutionary provocation, that ultimately claims the
movie. Director Garrel (who lived much of this, and was in a long relationship
with iconic singer Nico) certainly indulges himself here, and I find it
difficult to make much of a guess as to what sense of him might emerge from
viewing his more than twenty earlier works, but Regular Lovers at least was one of the highlights of the festival
for me.

The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary
Harron)

This
sweet-natured account of 50’s pin-up queen Page is intended as a “celebration”
of her life, and so it is – it’s hard to imagine a more benign treatment of
once-inflammatory material. Page was an aspiring actress who started doing
glamour shots on the side and gravitated first to “tasteful” nudity and then to
S&M, 50’s style (per the film at least, she was only incidentally troubled
by, or even aware of, the use that male purchasers might have been making of
this material). Meanwhile, she went to acting classes, using thoughts of Jesus
for inner motivation. Gretchen Mol is very good as Bettie, achieving a complete
immersion in the character; as someone puts it, she’s consistently successful
in spending half the film nude without ever looking naked. The movie dramatizes
anti-smut Senate hearings – soberly and diligently allowing the testimony of a
grieving father who attributes his son’s death to the photographs’ influence –
and has a vivid period flavour, but there’s not much sociological ambition on
display here, and it ultimately feels like coasting for Harron (who was in more
dialectical mode with her earlier films I
Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho)
– the feminist angle is simply that regardless of what porn meant for women in
the longer term, Bettie’s career made sense to her, and that’s all anyone needs
to know. It’s not that I take issue with this...it’s just that it’s kind of
limited. Unlike most biopics, there’s no end note on what happened to Bettie
after she ended her career – the final mark of what might actually be an
over-respectful treatment of her.

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)

When you’re
seeing three or four films a day for ten days, you probably treat some of them
less kindly than you should, and I’ve always thought I was too snippy two years
ago about Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn.
Subsequently I’ve read many great accounts of it, and the programme book at the
time said it had “the shape of an entrancing,
wordless vision.” I wrote it had “just the shape of one, with the feeling of an
absent centre.” This was surprising since I’d loved Tsai’s previous film, What Time Is It There, which I often
found virtually hypnotic. And recently I rewatched his early movie Rebels of the Neon God, a film utterly
anchored in a specific time and culture, with an aching identification for the
people it follows, and at the same time utterly timeless, cultivating a
transcendently perverse deadpan sensibility.

Tsai
is simply a terrific director. But the journey from Rebels to Dragon Inn
illustrates a diminishing interest in the contours of the real world, and this
perhaps troubling trajectory takes a further leap with The Wayward Cloud. The new film also ups the ante considerably on
sexual explicitness, often to the extent of seeming rather callow and tawdry,
but it comes together at the end with immense, unnerving authority. It’s
another desolate urban landscape, apparently with no running water (meaning
that bottled water litters virtually every scene) but with a surfeit of
watermelons, the erotic possibilities of which are juicily seized. The film is
a triangle of sorts, with a male porn actor at the centre, his female
co-actress at the other, and at the other a restrained young woman with whom he
develops a tentative mutual attraction.

The
film is full of images of displaced, warped sexuality, often immensely
well-conceived, and also (as in Tsai’s film The
Hole) incorporates various throwback musical numbers that through their
colour and panache further underline the wretchedness of the real world. But
the implications of all this seem familiar, circling round well-marked
territory, with the new relish for sexual excess serving as the only
(questionable) point of advancement. But then there’s the ending. which is
gripping, horrible, sick and nihilistic, all of which in the circumstances I’m
offering up as a compliment; it ensures that the film leaves more chilling an
after-effect than any of his previous works. Overall, in truth, I enjoyed this
garish work more than the objectively superior Goodbye Dragon Inn. But Tsai pulls it off only by the skin of his
teeth, and he is desperately in need of a new preoccupation.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

An overdue mea culpa
– I used to bash Pulp Fiction fairly
often in these pages, usually as an example of an overrated triviality
illustrating Hollywood’s loss of direction and higher purpose. I haven’t
mentioned it for a couple of years at least now – maybe a sad sign of the
effect of Quentin Tarantino’s Kubrick-like deliberation over his next project
(out of sight, out of mind). But I watched the film again the other day, for
the first time since it came out, and felt quite ashamed of my early carping.
Sure, there’s a lot in it that’s self-indulgent, wantonly brutal and violent –
the sheer confidence can become grating. But I think I vastly underestimated
the film’s formal intelligence. It’s a remarkable mix of fluent storytelling
and of longeurs that would be deadly boring, if not for Tarantino’s amazing
ability to soak in the nuances and idiosyncracies of a particular situation.

Rewatching Pulp Fiction

Time and character
and normal concepts of causation and motivation seem almost infinitely mutable
and extendible in Tarantino’s hands – he strips the story down to its bones and
lays them bare while simultaneously investing in them a stranger and more
scintillating life. And even the mythic ambitions, Jackson’s quoting from the
Bible and the strange suitcase and the guy in the basement and so forth, seemed
much more compelling to me this time, validated by Tarantino’s almost
transcendent mood and structure.

Best of all perhaps
was the film’s extreme, glowing romanticism, especially in the sequence between
John Travolta and Uma Thurman: it takes two extreme, nerve-ridden personalities
and forges a real connection between them – before blowing it away again. As
with the relationship between Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, there’s no question
that Tarantino believes in love even under extreme pressure, but he’s also
aware of how malformed and objectively crazy the resulting relationships might
be. In all, a great film, and I apologize for all my cheap cracks. It may be
time now to look at Fight Club again
as well.

Anyway, just thought
I should get that off my chest. Pulp
Fiction was of course an astonishing career resurgence for Travolta –
there’s a real spontaneity and emotional nakedness in his work there (as well
as fine, unpredictable comedy timing) and he should probably have won the Oscar
for it. Since then. He’s been as great in such works as Primary Colors, She’s so Lovely and Get Shorty. But lately his work has severely waned. He was the best
thing in Battlefield Earth, but his
performance made only slightly more sense than the movie as a whole. In Swordfish he seemed complacent, bloated
from too many early paychecks. I didn’t see Domestic
Disturbance (why would anyone?) I doubt that much of interest will come
from him in the near future.

The Shipping News

For a while,
Travolta was attached to the film version of The Shipping News, but it didn’t work out and the role passed to
Kevin Spacey. At this point, I think we should probably be grateful. When I
think of Travolta in The Shipping News,
my mind keeps defaulting to Demi Moore in The
Scarlet Letter. But the gratitude is strictly relative, for I think the
film would have been better off without Spacey too. Also without Julianne
Moore, Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench and the rest of its starry cast.

I haven’t read the
book, but based on all accounts and on what filters through the film, it’s a
fairly raw account of a physical and emotional unfortunate. The film is
generally wistful – which is exactly the adjective that best applied to
director Lasse Hallstrom’s last two films, The
Cider House Rules and Chocolat. The Shipping News is much better than Chocolat, which seemed to me entirely
inconsequential and manipulative. But there’s a frosted quality to it that
holds most emotion at length.

Spacey plays a
widower, lifelong deadbeat and father of a young girl who comes with his aunt
to Newfoundland, the home of his ancestors. Although he has no journalistic
experience, he finds work on the local newspaper, writing the shipping news. He
slowly develops a relationship with a local widow played by Moore.

The film is
inevitably very pictorial, but in the manner of a travel brochure, with bits of
local eccentricity and legend dotted throughout. I don’t think it conveys the
feel of Newfoundland nearly as well as New
Waterford Girl captured the similar feel of Cape Breton. The comparison is
instructive – for New Waterford Girl
was a cheap, homely film with the confidence to experiment. Hallstrom’s biggest
problem as a director, by far, is his adherence to traditional notions of
accessible, sensitive storytelling. He is, very likely, the polar opposite of
Quentin Tarantino is just about every way possible. You don’t get the sense
that Hallstrom could possibly be enjoying himself that much on the set – he
makes everything feel so strenuous.

Experimentation wanted

This doesn’t create
the best environment for actors to do their best work. Hallstrom’s films have
done well lately on scoring Oscar nominations (and a win for Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules), so the Academy
doesn’t agree with me. But he plays safely into our expectations. Spacey gives
a wounded puppy kind of performance; Moore is radiant. Both actors are too
intelligent to convey the tentativeness that their characters seem to require.
Most everyone else in the film looks too good (the authentically drawn and
worried-looking Pete Postlethwaite, as a nasty colleague of Spacey’s, being the
main exception).

There are real pleasures
in the film though. I liked the depiction of Spacey’s growing confidence as he
learns to work with words; how he finds a real personality in conjunction with
an artistic one. The ensemble acting around the local paper is usually amusing.
But the romance between Spacey and Moore seems distinctly undramatic. Except
for some minor disagreement at the start, they’re always moving toward each
other. In general, everything seemed overly compressed to me – the film should
surely have been longer.

Actually, I’d like
to see Quentin Tarantino direct something like The Shipping News. That sounds crazy, but he’ll surely never top
what he’s done already in the lowlife stakes – and the long creative silence
suggests he knows it. Pulp Fiction’s
exquisitely tender and dreamy sequences between Bruce Willis and Marta de
Medeiros showed Tarantino could maintain a softer mood without losing his head.
He should give that part of himself a more extensive workout. The appeal of
experimentation only goes so far though, for I have no desire to see what Lasse
Hallstrom does with a Pulp Fiction-kind
of script.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).